Short biography
Dr Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound artist, and researcher. His work asks how Early Music instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices might be reactivated to speak to contemporary experience. Working across long-form microtonal structures, custom electronics, and site-specific installation, he is particularly drawn to questions of place, ecology, and heritage.
His work has been shortlisted for an Ivor Novello Award for Best Sound Art and named among New Scientist‘s albums of the year. Commissions include works for the National Gallery, Tate Britain, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and Royal Holloway’s Cyborg Soloists project, with performances across the UK and internationally, including at Het Orgelpark, Amsterdam. From 2027 he embarks on We Become the Enfolders, a major new body of work combining landscape instruments and site-specific performance in and around Aldeburgh.
Alongside his compositional practice, Tassie is Lecturer in Composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and hosts Future Classical on Resonance FM, where he has interviewed composers including George Benjamin, John Luther Adams, and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir.
Long biography
Dr Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, sound artist, and researcher. With a practice spanning long-form microtonal structures, custom electronics, multimedia artworks, and installation, his work asks how Early Music instruments, tuning systems, and performance practices can be reactivated to speak to contemporary experience.
Current projects explore sound at the intersection of microtonality, extended instrumental practice, and immersive audiovisual technologies. Earth of Shine and Dark Mottling (2025–2026) is a concert work, Dolby Atmos recording, and 360° virtual reality film for three spectrally retuned bass viols, developed with violist Liam Byrne and creative technologist Sophie Hedderwick. O Suns—O Grass of Graves (2026), for saxophone and live electronic processing — commissioned by saxophonist David Zucchi with funds from the Vaughan Williams Trust and Hinrichsen Foundation — explores the saxophone’s harmonically complex, unstable multiphonics in quadraphonic sound.
Earlier work shared this interest in technologically mediated immersion in microtonal sound. Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees (2021–23) saw Tassie sample and digitally reconfigure significant historical organs. Commissioned by Zubin Kanga for Royal Holloway’s Cyborg Soloists project, the piece was premiered at the National Gallery, London, with an additional performance at Het Orgelpark, Amsterdam, and a CD release on the record label Flung.
From 2027, Tassie embarks on a major new body of work: We Become the Enfolders. Comprising a series of landscape instruments and site-specific performances in and around Aldeburgh — including an Aeolian Henge installed on the beach and a custom drone organ installed in Imogen Holst’s house — the project will trace the intertwined histories of England’s East coast and the Aldeburgh Festival, culminating in films, an album, and live performances.
A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time (2023) exemplifies Tassie’s ongoing interest in place, ecology, and heritage. An album, film, and geolocated audio artwork, the work featured custom-built, water-powered historical instruments and live instrumentalists, and was recorded on location in Sheffield’s historic Rivelin Valley. It was shortlisted for the 2024 Ivor Novello Award for Best Sound Art, named one of New Scientist‘s ‘Best Science-inflected Albums of 2023,’ and featured in Bandcamp Daily‘s Best Field Recording Albums. It was described by BBC Radio 3’s Kate Molleson as “a very subtle and time slowing album,” and by The Quietus as “a series of texturally rich drift states.”
Three earlier works share this concern with place and heritage. Quartet for a Landscape (2021), written in collaboration with the Icelandic quartet Nordic Affect, set new music for Baroque strings and harpsichord, recorded in Reykjavík then played at dawn through a single loudspeaker at Stanage Edge, in the Peak District. Accrete (2021), for medieval rebec and two sopranos, sonified a 12th-century church site in the City of London and was presented as a reel-to-reel tape installation for the London Festival of Architecture. Silvertown (2017), made in collaboration with experimental choir Musarc and poet Annie Freud, was written for performance in a disused East London factory, tracing the industrial history of that part of the city.
Other notable commissions include a sound installation for the National Gallery, London, a solo Lates performance for Tate Britain, arrangements of songs by Björk, Radiohead, and others for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and a new music-theatre work for lute, synthesisers, drag queen, and soprano, commissioned for performance at the Royal Academy of Arts, Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the National Trust’s Sutton House.
Alongside his compositional practice, Tassie is Lecturer in Composition at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where he is also Research and Innovation Associate on the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project ‘Sonic Heritage and Environmental Change on England’s East Coast, 1718–present’. He hosts the radio series Future Classical on Resonance FM, in which he has interviewed composers including George Benjamin, John Luther Adams, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, Annea Lockwood, and Sarah Davachi. He holds a PhD from Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, a Master’s degree from the Royal College of Music (where he was an RCM Scholar), and an undergraduate degree from King’s College London and the Royal Academy of Music.
